Google Glass is Dead; Long Live Google Glass

After years of research and development and two years of limited sales, Google announced today that it are ending sales of its heads up display, Google Glass.

The project is being promoted out of the Google(X) labs and placed under Nest founder and CEO Tony Fadell. Ivy Ross will continue to run the day-to-day operations of the Glass organization, which it appears is now part of Nest.

from a Museum of the Future ...

But most importantly:

As part of this transition, we’re closing the Explorer Program so we can focus on what’s coming next. January 19 will be the last day to get the Glass Explorer Edition. In the meantime, we’re continuing to build for the future, and you’ll start to see future versions of Glass when they’re ready.

I don't want to sound like I have 20-20 hindsight, but I'm not surprised that they're ending sales, and I don't expect Google Glass to ever be available again.

One of the posts I had been planning to write for CES focused on Google Glass. Last year it was incredibly common, this year not so much.

When I say that at CES 2014 I could look across the crowd and see a dozen Google Glass (or more) being worn, I am not exaggerating; it really was that common.

This year, not so much. I rarely saw more than a single Google Glass at a time. While that is not by any means a thorough market research effort, it does tell me that the rich techies who can afford Google Glass bought it and then stopped using it.

That kind of an adoption and abandonment rate is startling to say at the least; can you imagine if all those techies had decided to abandon their tablets? Their smartphones? I cannot picture it, and yet I saw for myself that the Google Glass came and went, with most of the discarded wearables relegated to the closet or CraigsList.

Share this:

Check These Out!

Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader:"I've been into reading ebooks since forever, but I only got my first ereader in July 2007. Everything quickly spiraled out of control from there. Before I started this blog in January 2010 I covered ebooks, ebook readers, and digital publishing for about 2 years as a part of MobileRead Forums. It's a great community, and being a member is a joy. But I thought I could make something out of how I covered the news for MobileRead, so I started this blog."

10 Comments on Google Glass is Dead; Long Live Google Glass

I’m not surprised either. Know why? Because literally less than half a year after Google Glass was announced, Texas Instruments abruptly announced that they would be ending support for their low-power chips in mobile devices. No one else had a suitable chip for the product, so Google was stuck spinning its wheels.

By the time that Glass got into people’s hands, the chip (and thus TI’s support for it) had been dead for over six months. That’s part of the reason why it was stranded on Android 4 for the longest time, and why Android 4.4 sucked so much on it. Frankly I’m surprised they continued selling it for this long.

This is why the fact Intel is working with Google on Intel’s low-power chips (which was revealed back in Decemeber) is so important. You need an actively-supported chip to to do any real development with it.

The hype train had already left the station, and they needed a bigger test pool anyway. What they should have done ended sales exactly a year after people started getting Glass. Would have been much easier PR-wise.

Google Glass failed because it made the wearer look like a Walking Tech Victim, a doofus who had so little self-respect for his/her own brain, they needed to attach an artificial chip to their head so that they could ‘experience’ their own life.

It was the very epitome of Not Cool. Sort of like attaching an Iphone to your nose.